Companies, research institutions, and other organizations increasingly create and distribute electronic surveys to gather information about target populations, services, products, and other interests. The use of electronic surveys continues to gain popularity in part because potential survey respondents increasingly have access to personal computers, mobile devices, and other computing devices that facilitate receiving and responding to electronic surveys over a communication network. To capitalize on the increased access to electronic surveys, some organizations engage outside firms with survey methodologists who create and distribute electronic surveys, such as surveys designed to apply a certain survey methodology. Moreover, many organizations increasingly use electronic survey systems to create, distribute, and manage electronic surveys for the organization, rather than rely on outside firms, such as survey methodologists.
While electronic surveys have facilitated the ease at which organizations can gather and use electronic survey information, standard setting organizations, government laws or regulations, and strategists increasingly request information from various target populations. For instance, laws and regulations often request the same or similar data from many different organizations. Consequently, to comply with various industry or governmental standards, organizations often need to obtain the same or similar information from a target population based on a particular standard. Accordingly, many organizations continue to increase their reliance on electronic surveys to collect information to meet various industry or government standards.
Unfortunately, conventional electronic survey systems have several disadvantages related to allowing organizations to create and distribute an electronic survey. For example, conventional electronic survey systems fail to account for the fact that many organizations lack experience in generating and distributing an effective electronic survey. In particular, conventional electronic survey systems often rely on a user within an organization to choose and generate a question type and answer format, question content, and answer content for each question within an electronic survey. Accordingly, based on conventional electronic survey systems relying on an inexperienced user to format and provide electronic survey question content, many conventional electronic survey systems ultimately provide an electronic survey that does not meet a desired industry or government standard.
Moreover, even in the event that an electronic survey does not incorporate industry or government standards, conventional electronic survey systems often result in inexperienced users creating electronic surveys that generate unreliable or incorrect survey response data. For example, based on conventional electronic survey systems requiring a user to generate survey question content, many users provide a question format or question wording that is confusing or ambiguous, which in turn generates unreliable survey response data. Worse yet is that many organizations make important strategic decisions based on survey response data. Thus, conventional electronic survey systems often result in an organization using unreliable, incomplete, or even incorrect survey response data to make strategic decisions.
Accordingly, these and other disadvantages decrease the utility and reliability of conventional systems and methods for providing electronic surveys.